PlayStation has committed to a flurry of purchases over the past year and recently added both Destiny producer Bungie and Jade Raymond’s new studio Haven to their portfolio of first-party developers, but Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has assured fans that Sony will be continuing this consolidation trend in the near future.
After announcing a new PS Plus subscription plan to counter Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, Jim Ryan discussed the gaming juggernaut’s plans for the near future at length during the latest episode of the PlayStation podcast. Addressing whether Sony will be able to keep up with Xbox’s 32+ studios after the industry-shattering Activision Blizzard deal, here’s what the exec had to say.
We’re in a really good place with PlayStation Studios and have been for the past few years. The critical success and the commercial success of the games that they’ve been making has given us permission to invest heavily in content creation. We’re growing our studios organically and we’re growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021, we’re in discussions with Bungie and we have more planned. This is getting us into a virtuous cycle where success begets success.
Apart from Bungie and Haven, PlayStation has also acquired Bluepoint Games (Demon’s Souls remake), Housemarque (Returnal), and PC developer Nixxes Software. But with more acquisitions to come as Ryan has teased, which major studio would be next?
I guess that’s a question only time will be able to answer.